Uber launches in Paris at LeWeb '11!

Uber, a well-known taxi service in the Bay Area for its elegant and fast service, has launched in Paris! "Everyone's private driver," we wish we could have had this last year when it seemed like the sky was going to fall on Paris from the amount of snow!

Travis Kalanick, Uber's co-founder and CEO, told MG Siegler, "We've had cars on the ground since Friday, and we feel like we're rolling out a transportation system."

If you're unfamiliar with Uber, here's how it works : you want a cab, so you call Uber. Uber sends out a ping to all of the elite taxi drivers in its service. Whomever is the closest or says that they will go, chooses to pick you up, and will let you know how long until they will be there. No more waiting in the street for 2 hours, you'll know exactly how long and just where they are. When Uber gets to you, the driver will call you to let you know they have arrived. All of this is done on your Uber account, too, so you can even call an Uber cab for a friend.

"We like to say we give drivers hugs," said Travis, explaining how while they respond to a need for more taxi drivers that are on demand, they also provide more opportunities for drivers, themselves.

Travis also announced that Uber just closed a round of funding at $32 million with Menlo Ventures!

Uber is starting with 60 cars simultaneously in Paris, and the number of cars that they will have will depend on the demand.

For those of you wondering about the taxi lobbies in Paris, Uber works with private car companies, many of whom are former taxi drivers.

LeWeb Latest News

Every year, the goal of LeWeb and its press relations is to put forward the startups and stars that will be at LeWeb. We are thrilled to have such a program and share what will be going on both with international tech and non-tech spheres. This year we saw press apparitions about LeWeb in:
NYTimes on France as the focus of digital optimism
Nicolas Sarkozy : "I greatly admire American vitality"
Eric Schmidt : "I love France"
Loic Le Meur:...

Although LeWeb 2011 is past and LeWeb 2012 is already on the horizon for us, we wanted to take a moment to take a tour of blog posts from this year that provided us with great feedback that we always look for. We would like to thank all of you that helped us spread the world about tech innovation in Europe and around the world and for your support.
SoLoMo at LeWeb
SoLoMo has changed the meaning of media, and one issue that our SoLoMo and Media panel looked at is how you can scale...

This year we tried something completely new and found out that you loved it so much - one attendee even started her own :
Illustrating LeWeb 2011 with....
JESS3
JESS3 made grand summaries of every day of LeWeb in a multitude of colors that you can find on our Flickr album.
Thank you to Jim Hollander, Leslie Bradshaw, Jesse Thomas, and team for their beautiful work
DAY 1
DAY 2
DAY 3
THE GRAND SUMMUM
2011 vs 2010
LiveSketching.com
Thank you to Daniel...

Hojoki, a platform that launched on the first day of LeWeb 2011 (check out a video here) after one year of development and six months of private alpha testing, wants to bring all your cloud apps into one place.
Free for the moment, with freemium features on the way, it ties together your apps like Beanstalk, Delicious, Dropbox, GitHub, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Highrise, Pivotal Tracker, Ta-Da List, Twitter, and has more coming soon like Evernote and Zendesk. Everything updates in...

You've been numerous in sending us your stats and numbers from LeWeb 2011. We'd like to thank everyone that helped us get a real sense of what was going on online and onsite this year :
At LeWeb 2011, there were a total of over 3500 attendees in Paris from 69 countries, and more than 200,000 participants online
Radian6
Radian6 analyzed stats around LeWeb for :
Pre-DAY 1 : http://slidesha.re/uRg7XG
DAY 1 : http://slidesha.re/tWb0in
DAY 2 : http://slidesha....

During the Social Media Track part of LeWeb Day 3 on our Plenary II Stage, Cedric Giorgi had a Q&A with Matt Flannery, Co-founder and CEO of Kiva.
We discussed social change and doing philanthropy in groups, as well as how Kiva got started (Kiva was initially helped by a few friends and family members of Matt until the word got out and the press fell in love with the organization), but at about minute 7:30, Matt started talking about the future.
He talked about how banking is...

Over 600 applications received, 32 semi-finalists, 16 finalists, and 4 winners for this year's LeWeb edition
We would like to thank Google for their collaboration in creating the LeWeb Startup Cafe where you could vote for your favorite startup to help us choose the Top 16 finalists, and then the People's Choice winner
Thank you also to Chris Shipley from Guidewire Group who coached the Startups and hosted the judging competition Days 1 & 2
In case you missed it...

This year's LeWeb was bigger than ever and we are planning on making 2012 even more remarkable.
In case you missed some or all of LeWeb, all of the videos can be found on our YouTube channel, as well as our UStream channel.
Here's a grand summary of what went down :
DAY 1 - - PLENARY I STAGE
Opening Remarks with Loic and Geraldine to a full audience at Les Docks and a surprise performance from Jeremy Maupilet, Wilfried Ebongue & Marcio de Barros...

LeWeb has become known as an event to see and be seen, network, find business, and be inspired.
There is one other quality of LeWeb that hit me when I asked Loic Le Meur what the values of LeWeb are when I first joined the team. He said,
LeWeb is about entrepreneurship. It's about being international. It's about inspiration. It's about the best of the best.
If next year, the best companies are in China, LeWeb may be in Chinese, who knows?
THAT said, I felt...